[Weekend wrap] The 15 mins of outrage and other stories

Our 'Always on a Sunday' weekend wrap comes with more fillings and crunch. Enjoy your Sunday with our in-depth stories and video of the week.

Outrage has become the currency of our times today, especially the online transaction variety. We are quick to take offence and even quicker to forget. This week, there was much to be outraged about. Thankfully, some of it has already been forgotten, buried deep down in our Twitter feeds.

Whether or not you uninstalled Snapchat, you will agree that the outrage over its young founder’s alleged statement about India was exactly what the doctor had ordered. Needless to say, our Monday morning meeting kickstarted on a good note. Just so that events like these are not all sound and fury signifying nothing, our team of writers goes beyond it to make sense for our readers.

Harshith Mallya–on whom I had bestowed the Resident Millennial title last week, which was later contested by other millennials in the office, provided us our own mini outrage–snapped up Evan Spiegel’s ‘poor’ comment about India to take a closer look at how Snapchat operates and probably why it isn’t bullish about India.

“When the Snapchat fiasco broke out over the last weekend, I put my national pride aside, and tried to analyse the alleged comment from the lens of a Snap Inc CXO based in the US,” he tells me.

As with other stories, here too we wanted to get both sides of the picture, and Harshith reached out to the Snap Inc. team for comments. He was surprised to see them respond within an hour.

“The next day, while I 'zoned in and out' of our Monday morning edit meeting, all the pieces of the puzzle came together for my story. I reached out to Snap Inc. again with some queries. A few grueling hours later I sent the story to YourStory's digital gatekeepers–my editors,” he is quick to update me with his backstory.

“The story has got a great response so far and while Snap Inc. declined to share inputs for this story, they did respond back once it was live. Let's just say that they had some off the record comments, which were not gaalis,” Harshith adds with a straight face.

Read the story here, if you haven’t already and tell us what you think of the comments below.

A closer look at how Snapchat operates and why it probably isn’t bullish about India

A good story is not only the result of taking all the viewpoints of the issue at hand, it becomes well rounded when the journalist reports it from ground zero. Athira Nair, whose world revolves around the e-commerce universe, visited the Gurgaon (or is it Gurugram?) office of ShopClues, the Unicorn that is quietly going about its business of making online shopping easy for the smaller cities and towns of India.

She came back surprised that the ShopClues office actually mirrors Delhi's Sarojini Nagar market–the place where regular folks like me shop. She says in the story,

“Compared to the swanky offices of online marketplaces such as Flipkart and Myntra, the ShopClues office is glaringly simple, the company choosing a more sober ambience over flashy colours and foosball stations.”

Read the story here, to find out how this underdog of e-commerce is silently pursuing its dream of doing an IPO with “zero funds crunch, no employee layoffs, a smaller team of 800 compared to the bigger players."  

The quiet and stupendous rise of Shopclues – India’s online bazaar

Talking of working silently to achieve dreams, Indore-based Prataap Snacks has been doing just that. Founded in 2003 by brothers Amit Kumat and Apoorva Kumat along with their friend Arvind Mehta, Prataap Snacks is today a Rs 850-crore company with four factories across the country and a distribution network made up of 168 super stockists across 24 states and one Union Territory and 2,900 distributors, writes the flamboyant Vishal Krishna, our Business Editor.

Though he did not make the trip all the way to Indore, I can tell you that no one knows their namkeen better than an Indori. That’s my hometown where it is snack time all hours of the day. 

Read the story here and do not forget to grab something to munch on while you digest some of the facts about the snack market.

Lord of the rings, Amit Kumat’s Rs 850cr Prataap Snacks of Indore eyes gold in the snack market

The week also brought in some good cheer to people who follow such things as lists of influential people in the world. Time magazine reputed for its annual list, included Prime Minister Narendra Modi and our own startup-boy-who-made-it-big Vijay Shekhar Sharma in its list of 100 most influential people in the world today.

We also got an in-depth interview with another influential person who is quietly working to make India a ‘powerful’ nation. As Minister of State with independent charge for power, coal, new and renewable energy, and mines, Piyush Goyal is a busy man, but he took time out to reflect on his journey and share his vision for a bright India with who else but the Chief Editor of YourStory Shardha Sharma.

As the master storyteller in the YS camp, she has the gift of drawing out untold stories from people. There’s a moment in this video interview with Piyush Goyal where the ever-smiling minister gets emotional bringing out a totally different side of his persona. That’s what good interviews do–show the viewer the multi-facets of the person in question. Watch the full video interview here.

The nation trusts the PM, and if we don’t deliver, it will be the worst breach of trust, says Piyush Goyal

If you have some more time to spare and just want to put your feet up with only your smartphone for company, I suggest you go here. You will find all the stories we did this week and more.

Until next week then, remember it is Always on a Sunday.